Ryan Pierson and Chris Pirillo discuss how ad-blocking software is ruining their revenue from LockerGnome on Google +(PDF). I’d link to LockerGnome, but I don’t really feel like it now. It’s because Chris Pirillo acts like he hates his readers. Publicly also. His response to the people that disagree with him? Calls them worse than parasites. Some screen grabs:

And later on he responds by calling everyone in the thread freeloaders:

(Side note: The offensive action here is not from Ryan Pierson, or the respectful way he shared his opinion. Chris Pirillo verbally attack readers.)

I think Chris has a problem outside of ad-blocking. I rarely ever look at LockerGnome because it is irrelevant and basic. There is no new information in there. It reminds me of the content on Kim Komando’s website. There isn’t very much discussion on the site either. Almost every article on the front page has no comments. It’s no Engadget. It’s no Gizmodo. What if their real problem is their articles generally aren’t very good, and the bid for ads to be displayed has decreased?

Of course not! There real problem is that everyone of their readers/customers is evil, a parasite, and uses ad-block. The problem can never be with them, it must be with the customer. And that’s a winning attitude that causes companies to disappear.

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Comments

I’m just going to leave this comment up here, in hopes that one day you’ll look at it, face palm, and realize how wrong you are in saying it.

You are creating content, posting it in an area that is freely accessible and then complaining about *how* your readers look at it. I have some sympathy for Ryan, because he doesn’t seem like a bad guy. Perhaps misguided, but he doesn’t rail against his own customers/potential customers like you do.

If you really cared about giving your customers a quality product, you’d take the time curate a quality product, and find a way to exchange that for compensation for your time instead of attacking them, or approaching technological change in the same way luddites do, which is unbecoming of a technology site.

I appreciate every one of our readers, and I most certainly didn’t call anyone any names. All I did was point out a very real situation that is impacting writers and site managers across the Web. Advertising is the only viable way sites can continue to exist. Imagine YouTube, Facebook, or Google without advertising. Either you’d be paying out of pocket to use these sites, or they wouldn’t exist at all. The New York Times tried different models including a paywall, and it nearly drove the company out of business. I spoke up about a problem that risks taking a lot of writers out of work. Last I checked, “find a real job” wasn’t a constructive way to combat the loss of an industry. If there were no journalists or pundits out there, the entire tech industry would be in a very different state. Companies would fold for lack of publicity. Last I checked, companies (like LockerGnome) are part of an employment ecosystem we should be working to protect. Content farms would step in and dominate the moment $2 becomes the going rate for an article on a site tens of thousands of people trust to give honest reviews.

I stumbled on this by total accident and i figure all over my two cents many years down the line.

I do understand where writers/bloggers extra are coming from but reactions like Chris had back then are totally the wrong ones.

This is there internet and one certainty about it is change which business have to evolve along with or fall behind.

There a new models now and they do work (not always perfectly) by the likes of tekthing and threatwire are good examples.

Blaming the people who read/watch your stuff is always a stupid move in the extreme and only hurts your business.
They are hardly responsible for changing tech or the fact that’s ad’s got so numerous and bad that ad block tech was made then used.

One needs to evolve with the times and figure out what people want to see and how to present it. Chris struggles at times trying to figure this out and a few times lashed out foolishly in the wrong way.
That said he a actually a nice guy trying to help and a bit of a odd duck but then what geek isn’t lol.

Antijingoist is a different story since he doesn’t seem to understand that the minute you have to name call someone to prove the point he was trying to he gone and made the same basic mistake Chris did at that time.

There also tends to be much more then we see in a few posts going on and peoples personal lives mixed in so being imperfect now and then is not a shock.